Google doesn’t want employees to use work email to organize, per report

Enlarge / Some Googlers held protest signs during the November 2018 walkout. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Newly revealed filings to the National Labor Relations Board show that attorneys for Google have been lobbying the agency to undo an earlier decision that required companies to let employees organize on the company's own email systems.

According to a Thursday report by Bloomberg, Google has urged the NLRB in both May 2017 and as recently as November 2018 to overturn a 2014 decision known as Purple Communications.

In that case, the majority found that workers at Purple Communications, an American Sign Language interpreting company, could not be barred from using their work email for organizing purposes. The three Democratic-appointed members found that the workers' own work email was a "natural gathering place," particularly when those workers-like ASL interpreters-were distributed across a wide geographic area.

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